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ANNIVERSARY ORATION 

or IHK. 

CINCINNATI OF NEW JERSEY. 

JULY 4, 185 9. 

BY JOHN HALL, D. 1). 



C. SCOTT & Co., Publishers. 



.-^'^ 



Slje d^^'^mples of t\t "^tkMmi 



THE 



ANNIVERSARY ORATION 



CINCINNATI OF NEW JERSEY, 

AT TRENTON, 

J"T7Xj"Z' 4, 1S59. 

BY JOHN HALL, D. D. 



TRENTON, N. J.: 

MURrHY &. BECHTEL, PRINTERS, OPPOSITE THK CITY HALL. 
1 859. 






m EXCHANGF 
fAA«- «tt>K U»w»^ jWr 

.JAN 21 1921 



OEATION^. 



Gentlemen (f the Cincinnati of New Jersey, 

and Fellow Citizens : 

Thursday, the Fourth day of July, 177G, was a 
day of grave, of solemn, as well as of exciting in- 
terest. It was a small company of thoughtful, anx- 
ious men — not a crowd such as now fills the Capitol — 
w^hich on that day was assembled in the old State 
House in Philadelphia. They were men of boldness 
and decision, of determination and courage, but they 
were men ; men of deep-rooted, hereditary attach- 
ment to England and the English throne, men of 
families and of property ; men of high honor ; not 
actuated by selfish ambition ; not seeking political 
independence fram faction or for personal gain. All 
was at stake which such high-minded patriots knew 
how to value, more than the unreflecting who may 
have loved the occurrence of revolution for the sake 
of the excitement, and had less care for its results, 
because they had nothing valuable to lose, nothing 
sacred to abandon. 

The very term revolution is a fearful one to such 
patriots as were presided over by John Hancock. 
Its ideas are those of changing what is established, 



overturning old foundations, innovating upon ancient 
institutions. The revolution of the heavens is their 
order ; they revolve in regularity ; their cycles, though 
in perpetual movement, are as fixed as the granite 
foundations of the everlasting hills. But when revo- 
lution is applied to civil government, it denotes dis- 
ruption, confusion, diecord, war ; and the fear of 
change perplexes not monarclis only, but their best 
subjects. Such subjects had George the Third in 
those men who camo to the old State House of the 
colony of Pennsylvania eighty-three years ago, to 
convert it into a Hall of National Independence. 

But the gravity and solemnity of the day we cele- 
brate have begun to disappear from our associations. 
The men who signed for themselves and us, for the 
mighty constituencj- which has only begun to show 
its extent, the Declaration of American Nationality, 
have disappeared from our sight, and every year that 
widens our distance from them diminishes the influ- 
ence of their names and their examples. As long as 
any of the signers lingered among us, as long as their 
revolutionary contemporaries in the mass of citizens 
survived, the spirit of the great day of '76 was jDro- 
portionately reverenced. The presence of those 
shadows of the past overawed the new generations. 
But when they were at length extinct, the Fourth 
began to be a common day, the Declaration to fall 
into the grade of a common State paper, and the sig- 



natures of the illustrious fifty-six, from Josiah Bart- 
lett to George Walton, to represent comparative 
strangers to the new age of Americans. 

Such is the result of time ; of continued prosperity ; 
such the effect of being accustomed to blessings with- 
out having first known what it was to be without 
them ; such the effect of inheriting privileges without 
knowing, except historically, the cost at which they 
were procured. 

The great object then, my fellow citizens, in keep- 
ing up the observance of the anniversary of Inde- 
pendence should be to keep up the memory and the 
influence of its Principles and its Men. The chief 
purpose of history, in all its forms, (and the anniver- 
sary is one of them,) is not to preserve antiquarian 
records, to transmit facts, to relate that such and 
such persons lived, and that such and such deeds 
were performed ; or even to extol the deeds and 
eulogize the men. History is not an amusement, but 
a study. Its office is to instruct, to admonish, to 
show us the valuableness or worthlessness of what 
we find about us ; to infuse, by the recital, the vir- 
tues we are made to admire in the past, and which 
are capable of being imitated in the present. TVe 
know very well that we are independent, without 
keeping the Fourth of July. The Declaration of In- 
dependence, as a document, is in our school books. 
But the day, as a monument to principles, the Dccla- 



6 

ration, as a grave moral sentiment, as a covenant and 
avowal binding us as well as the nation of that day, 
this whole reproduction of the scenes, the actors, and 
the jourposes that make that day and its great deed 
so worthy of memor}^, these are the impressions 
which if not sought and declared, and readopted in 
our own names, turn our commemorations into mock- 
eries, and make us guilty of dishonor to the graves 
of our Fathers. But, on the other hand, what a 
means of preserving our true position, of purifying 
our political sentiments, of maintaining the sound 
patriotism of the country, would it be, if, with the 
birth-day of our liberties, we could even annually re- 
vive the spirit in which they were engendered and 
born ! 

We are familiar with the designation of a period 
in intellectual history as the revival of learning ; with 
other periods in economical history called revivals of 
trade and commerce ; with others in moral history 
called revivals of religion. The same declensions 
which in these several dejDartments of human interests 
necessitated the reaction that goes by this name, 
when they exist in political history, caH for a revival 
of patriotism — ^of genuine politics. I say a revival ; 
for it is not the necessity of our age to create — to 
originate American patriotism. We have it in its 
purest mould, in its perfect models, in the men who 
achieved our separation from an unsuitable and de- 



grading connection abroad ; who framed our consti- 
tution and laws ; who inaugurated and administered 
the system ; and who stamped on all they did the 
impress of their personal virtue. What greater 
blessing could wo ask for our country than to be able 
to summon to the Capitol next December the men 
who founded our Republic ? What part of the con- 
federacy, which this day adds the thirty-third star to 
its flag, would not consent to submit the whole coun- 
try to the legislation of such representatives as com- 
posed the first Congress ? What American, native 
or naturalized, would hesitate to commit the entire 
executive power, this day or any day, to the first 
President ? But the next thing after the impossible 
revival of the men, is the revival of their wisdom, 
their purity, their principles. All these survive. 
They are imperishably wrought into the fabric of our 
institutions. We have their debates, their essays, 
their correspondence, their enactments, their nego- 
tiations. Their personal history remains, attesting 
their sincerity and disinterestedness. Their success 
remains — attesting their sagacity, and indicating that 
there was a higner and more efficient guidance of 
their counsels and proceedings than unaided human 
wisdom. For I trust it will not be considered by this 
audience a mere professional sentiment on my part, 
when I say that the thirteen tribes of Israel (for tliir- 
teen was their actual number by the double tribe of 



8 

Joseph) were not more obviously guided by Divine 
Providence, were not more distinctly placed under 
tlie instrumentality of men raised up and endowed 
for the accomplishing of high and far-reaching pur- 
poses for mankind, than were the thirteen American 
Colonies, when the time had come for the exodus 
from their vassalage to a land now for the first time 
truly their own. And the most profitable, and per- 
haps the least tedious discourse, that could be pro- 
nounced this day would be a selection of passages 
from the Books of Moses, setting forth the source and 
the principles of national prosperity, and the obliga- 
tions of a free and religious people to abide by the 
Supreme Law of the King of Kings and Lord of 
Lords. 

And this reminds us of the acknowledgements due 
this day, of the ecclesiastical independence effected 
by the revolution, which placed the church of the 
United States on the primitive basis of a spiritual 
body under a Divine head, requiring no ' ' conformity," 
asking and accepting no identification with the pow- 
ers of civil government. " Head and Supreme Gov- 
ernor of the Church," is one of the constitutional 
titles of the British monarch ; and though religious 
liberty has made some progress in Britain since the 
great " dissent" of '76, so that the Jew and Roman 
Catholic sit in Parliament, and her Majesty is a Pres- 
byterian at Balmoral and an Episcopalian at Wind- 



9 

sor, and I suppose, as a grandmother, a Lutheran at 
Berhn — yet enough remams, even in the glorious 
empire of Victoria, to make us content with our 
more free and vohmtary system, as compared with 
her church estabhshments. We have the church. 
Our history, from the beginning, is full of proof that 
the ark of the covenant, as well as the rod of Moses, 
came over and remained with our fathers ; and the 
continued presence of the Holy Spirit of God, in mul- 
tiplying, extending and making effective His inspired 
word, has never ceased to accredit the genuineness 
of our free Christianity in the variety of its outward 
forms. 

We are accustomed on the Fourth of July to hear 
more of the sword of the revolution, than of almost any 
other agency. Yet what particular day in all the an- 
nals of that epoch ought to be more suggestive of the 
power of the pen and of the tongue ? The only sword 
drawn on the Fourth of July, '76, was the paper one 
adopted on the evening of that day, after a three 
days' debate. True, more material arguments had 
been already resorted to. The fields of Lexington 
and Bunker's Hill had anticipated, by more than a 
year, the calmer proceedings of Chestnut street. But 
the battles prior to the Declaration were not the vv^or. 
They were local resistances of some immediate ag- 
gressions. They were provincial, not national. The 
military acts of Congress had only been advisory and 



10 

defensive. It was not till the signing of the declara- 
tion that the Congress assumed, as we have just 
heard, on the ground of ''free and independent 
states," " full power to levy war, conclude peace, con- 
tract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all 
other acts and things which independent states may 
of right do." In that paper, in its clear logic, its plain 
facts, its self-evident conclusions, la}^ the power which 
was to cast off tyranny, and justify to the world then 
and for ever, all the consequences that might follow. 
The Declaration of Independence contains no decla- 
ration of war. The pen of Jefferson only wrote the- 
final conclusions of what had already been discussed 
in the " Farmer's Letters" of Dickinson, the " Mon- 
itor" of Lee, Bland's " Inquiry," Nicholas's "Con- 
siderations," Paine's "Common Sense," and the 
writings of a host of coadjutors in newspapers and 
pamphlets. The pens of the signers only made the 
eiKlorsement of the national SG^ntiment in the name of 
the thirteen states they represented. 

The same may be asserted of the contribution to 
the moral power of the act of independence, made by 
the arguments of the colonial statesmen and public 
speakers from 'New Hampshire to Georgia. They 
were not, as a general thing, inflammatory harangues, 
bombastic appeals to the ignorant. It was necessary 
to show the facts of the issue, and prove the legal 
right of the people to redress themselves in order to 



11 

bring them to their proper position. We have a 
specimen of what was depended on as the true basis 
of success, in the fact that Congress sent two clergy- 
men, one from his church in Newark, and another 
from his church in Trenton, to visit parts of Virginia, 
the Carohnas and Georgia, to give the people in cer- 
tain remote settlements an intelligent understanding 
of the controversy, and of their rights and duties in 
relation to it. It was not yet the day when the pa- 
triotic sentiments of America, and the exercise of a 
free political choice, were to be turned about and 
guided as by a bit in the horse's mouth, or, by what 
is still more degrading, the bribes of office. Here is 
the political revival we need — a recurrence tq the in- 
telligence, the virtue, the trust in Providence which 
signalized the founding of our national fabric, and 
marked the personal character of its founders, in- 
cluding the great body of the people. That was no 
fanaticism which spoke in such terms as those em- 
ployed by Chief Justice Drayton, of South Carolina, 
in April, '76, in his official charge to the grand jury, 
when, at the close of a cool constitutional statement 
of the question of rights between king and people, he 
said : "I think it is my duty to declare in this awful 
seat of justice, and before Almighty God, that in my 
opinion the Americans can have no safety but by the 
Divine favor, their own virtue, and their being so 
prudent as not to leave it in the power of the British 



12 

rulers to injure them. * * * rpj^^ Almiglity 
created America to be independent of Britain. Let 
us beware of the impiety of being backward to act 
as instruments in the Almighty hand, now extended 
to accomplish his purpose. * * * In a 
word, our piety and political safety are so blended, 
that to refuse our labors in this Divine work, is to 
refuse to be a great, a free, a pious, and a happy 
people." 

I shall not undertake to draw the contrast between 
the politics of those days and the present. I will 
remember the inspired caution: "Say not thou, 
what is the cause that the former days were better 
than these ? For thou dost not inquire wisely con- 
cerning this." There are many and natural reasons 
for the change, besides such as imply degeneracy ; 
and perhaps, after all, our fathers were not so im- 
maculate, nor are we so depraved, as Fourth of July 
speeches would make out. But still it well becomes 
us to take care that we do not exhaust our patriot- 
ism in the applause of the past, or in complacency 
with ourselves. There is a New America all the 
time developing ; to adjust that developement to the 
vital elements of our political existence is the trying 
problem of successive ages. We need to do some- 
thing more than celebrate our Independence. We 
are independent, and by the Divine blessing mean to 
keep so. But to study how to use our nationality, 



13 

liow to preserve it sound and pure, how to recom- 
mend it and diffuse it, by the evidence of our welfare 
under it, over the rest of our American continent, 
and over the other hemisphere — this is the highest 
celebration of the great deed of '76. If to the mass 
of those who vote for legislators, representatives, 
governors, president, the only question is, whom 
does our party nominate ? if to such the whole 
science and morals of civil governn:ent consist in 
succeeding with the nominee ; if what a man's moral 
character, his capacity, his intelligence are, has little 
or nothing to do with supporting his election ; if the 
money, whether of the party or of the candidate 
himself, buys his place ; if men thrust themselves 
forward as seekers of place, and demand public posi- 
tions as the reward of their partisanship ; if intelli- 
gence and integrity become nothing in comparison 
with availability — if such signs as these should ever 
appear among us, then, in spite of all the cant about 
" progress," we cannot do better than go back to our 
beginning, fourscore and three years ago, and sit at 
the feet of those honest men who signed the Decla- 
ration, and sealed it before God with the pledge of 
their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. 

These considerations show the importance of train- 
ing American youth in a familiarity with the history 
and biography, as well as the constitution of their 
country. The mere chronicles of events will not do 



14 

this. The battles show the practical force of the 
principles contended for, but the diplomacy, the 
debates, the writings, and above all, the personal 
qualities of the leaders of opinion, and the movers 
of the whole proceedings, contain the oil which is to 
revive and keep burning the true fire of the Ameri- 
can altar. 

In speaking thus of the training of our sons and 
of ourselves in the substantial doctrines of our nation- 
ality, I do not detract from the claims on the per- 
petual memory of the country, of that class of patriots 
who literally fought for the cause. On their account, 
in their honor, let monuments arise on every spot 
where they contended, whether with success or 
defeat ; not raised as a memorial of the conflict itself, 
not to boast how many died, and how many suffered, 
or how deep the soil was wet with human blood, 
but to commemorate the spirit of devotion to justice, 
liberty, and humanity, which compelled those re- 
cruits of a day to defend their country and their 
homes against aggression. The battle monuments 
of a civilized and christian people should honor first 
of all the cause of the warfare. As it is not the 
signature of the declaration, but the declaration of 
itself, that is the chief object of our regard, and we 
honor the men for the sentiments they held, and the 
manner in which they avowed them, so we honor 
the parties in the battle according to the merits of 



15 

their cause, more than accordmg to the mere method 
or effect of their deeds in the field of contest. Who 
has thought of a monument to the thousands, whether 
of Austria or France, whose corpses fill the trenches 
of Montebello, Malegnano, and Magenta ? The real 
heroes of those latest fields of carnage are the few 
who are scarcely heard of, except in some feeble 
echo of the name of Garibaldi, the Piedmontese, 
and other obscure, that is, weak subjects of Austrian 
oppression, with whose cause, as the " down-trodden 
23eoples," our sj^mpathy was awakened a few years 
since, in the very spot where I stand, by that great 
master of English eloquence (whatever he may be 
in European politics) Louis Kossuth. They are the 
Emperors, and their hundreds of thousands of slaves 
in regimentals, who flaunt before the world in this 
drama, and take all the glory, (excepting that the 
Irish General McMahon is metamorphosed into a 
French Duke ;) but the humble Provinces, whose 
liberties are to be the prey of the successful power, 
the people whose are the fields and homes and 
churches invaded by the two great duellists, this is 
the party that must fill our thoughts, as spectators 
of the war, and they, because of the sentiments they 
represent. Yet let me not do the third Napoleon the 
injustice of omitting the acknowledgement that he 
wrote good doctrine on the 8th of last month, when 



16 

in his address to Lombardy, dated at Milan, lie said : 
" In the enlightened state of public opinion, there is 
more grandeur to be acquired by the moral influence 
that is exercised than by fruitless conquests, and 
that moral influence I seek with pride in contribut- 
ing to restore to freedom one of the finest parts of 
Europe." Let us hope that his Imperial Majesty, 
in his zeal for the precedents of his uncle, has not 
adopted the theory of his great minister Talleyrand, 
that the political use of words is to say what is not 
meant. So (to return to our philosophy of monu- 
ments) when we keep our days, and build our 
obelisks, and buy Mount Yernon, in memory of the 
triumphs of our noble Continentals, Army, Congress, 
People, and of him who was head of all and the 
spirit of all — the great Commander-in-Chief and 
President — let it be in love and honor for the soul, 
rather than the outward body of the cause, and to 
give it the highest possible honor and reward — the 
perpetuation of that soul in the successive genera- 
tions of our republican world. "We want not only 
the memories of Washington, and the other men of 
'76 — not only columns and statues — but new, living 
men, like them, to guide and adorn every era of our 
history. 

Such, I have no doubt, are the most effective 
motives that actuate the enterprise of constructing, 



17 

in our own town, a suitable memorial of the great 
incident of the 26th of December, '76, and its fol- 
lowing week. And seldom has so truly appropri- 
ate a design for a patriotic monument been devised, 
as will be laid before the corporators to-day. That 
enterprise is in the best hands, and the impulse it is 
receiving is a worthy feature of the general celebra- 
tion. I shall not trespass on ground so faithfully 
occupied by that company of our fellow citizens who 
are doing their best to eclipse us to-day ; but in 
illustration of the general topic I may say, that, in 
commemorating the Battle of Trenton, the smallest 
part of the great subject is the skill of the tactics, 
the success of its manoeuvre, the surprise of the 
German regiment, the victorious retreat, or the great 
aggregate of sagacity in the American leader, and 
fortitude in the troops, as evinced in every step of 
that week's work of mind and body from McKonkey's 
Ferry to Princeton. No heart, quicker than that of 
the Commander-in-Chief himself, would turn away 
from the mere details of the conflict. But the glory 
of the day, its monumental triumph, was its moral 
effect. The great victory of Washington on thig 
ground was not over a few Hessians, but over the 
fears and despondencies of his own countrymen, and 
over the pride and prestige represented by Sir Wil- 
liam Howe and Lord Cornwallis. The great honor 

which those days added to Washington's fame can 
2 



18 

never be told by any inscription, however minute in 
statistics of the battle-fields. That honor was but 
the developeinent of the occasion. It -showed what 
the man was, what he always was, equal to any 
emergency, prompt to every call of duty, faithful 
and fearless with many or with few, and having the 
trust of a Moses or a Joshua in the Providence 
whose favor to the just cause is stronger than 
armies. 

These sentiments, gentlemen of the Cincinnati, 
ought to be, and I am- confident are yours. They 
are both Roman and American. Our old friend 
Lucius Quintius — or Serranus (as he is called by 
Virgil* in allusion to his sowing his field, more ap- 
propriately for us, than Cincinnatus, from his curled 
hair) — is a hero, not because he conquered the -<Equi 
and delivered the consuls, nor because he brought 
to terms the Senate and the people in the Agrarian 
conflict, (what care we for any of these parties ?) but 
he is our hero and the hero of the world, because he 
was a soldier and a dictator, without ambition and 
without covetousness, coming out of retirement only 
from the necessity of serving his country in extremi- 
ty, and returning as soon as that necessity ceased ; 
refusing honors and riches as his reward, and content 
to have performed his duty. As Milton says of him, 

*" Te 8ulc0, Serrane, eerentem." — jSEneid, vi. 844, 



19 

in connexion with Fabricius, Curius, Regulus, and 
other Romans of the same stamp, they were great, 
because men 

" Who conld do mighty things, and could contemn 
Kichcs, tho' offered from the hand of Kings."* 

This is the immortaUty of Cincinnatus ; this the 
qnahty of his patriotism you cherish by adopting his 
name. After the havoc that Niebuhr has made of the 
" Viri Romte " of our school-days, we indeed hardly 
know whether we can certainly believe in the per- 
sonal reality of our hero, more than that of Romulus 
and Remus ; and the cautious Arnold gives the 
narrative in his legendary JEsop-like style, as "the 
story of Cincinnatus ;" but, fable or fact, the moral 
is the same. It is such patriotism as this, such pub- 
lic men as he, that the United States and each State 
need, and never more than at this day. They were 
such men as he, who, when in 1783 they assembled, 
at the end of the " eight years' conflict," to form an 
Association of the officers of the late Army, to be 
perpetuated by their descendants, placed at the basis 
of the institution, not a celebration of their own 
deeds, but such " principles " as these : " An inces- 
sant attention to preserve inviolate those exalted 
rights and liberties of human nature for which they 
have fought and bled, and without which the high 

*Paradise Regained: book ii. 



20 

rank cf a rational being is a curse, instead of a 
blessing" — "an unalterable determination to pro- 
mote and cherish between the respective States that 
union and national honor so essentially necessary to 
their happiness and the future dignity of the Ame- 
rican Empire." These, gentlemen, as your minutes 
show, were the expansive views taken by the founders 
of your Society. Though fresh from the actual 
warfare in which their names occupied so honorable 
a place, it was, as these extracts show, the cause of 
"human nature," of man as " a rational being," the 
" union and honor, happiness and dignity," of the 
whole "future" of their country, that they had in 
mind as the scope of their work. So the Declaration 
quotes " the laws of nature and of nature's God," as 
giving title to the separate and equal station of the 
new government. And so your diploma aeserts one 
of the purposes of your Association to be, "incul- 
cating the duty of laying down in peace arms as- 
sumed for public defence." 

This largeness of view was eminently characteris- 
tic of those days. Our patriot fathers were not 
working for themselves alone. They would hardly 
have thought their own immediate and short-lived 
interest in the question sufficient to justify the 
sacrifices they personally made. Is this the spirit 
of our age ? Is this the quality of our politics ? Are 



21 

such the aims and principles of our public men in 
and out of Congress, in and out of office ? 

Might not the confederate branches of the Cincin- 
nati do something by pen and mouth to show that 
they are hereditary possessors of these enlarged and 
unselfish principles of their sires, and revivQ through 
the country the spirit of the times when American 
statesmen looked beyond themselves and the present 
moment, and remembered that their private repu- 
tations and their public acts were both to influence 
future ages, and to be judged by them ? Might they 
not do something in imitation of the power of the 
pen of the revolution, to reform the political press 
of the country ? What a noble protest against all 
spurious politics would that be which should ema- 
nate from the heirs and representatives of the sign- 
ers and supporters of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, and its coincident manifestoes ! The Cincin- 
nati have long ago outlived and outlaughed the silly 
charge that they were contemplating a Patrician in- 
stitution ; but it would be a glorious order of Amer- 
ican nobility, if the pure blood of the men — states- 
men, soldiers, citizens — of the old north, south, east 
and west, not merely hereditary or exclusively na- 
tive, but the true knighthood, in which should be 
found men like the signers of the Declaration of In- 
dependence and the members of the first Congress, 
of all trades and professions, rich and 'poor, if, I say, 



22 

this true blood could be kept unmixed with the ille- 
gitimate line of men who, bearing the name of patriots, 
are simply and merely selfish jobbers. We want no 
aristocracy such as we understand from the idea of 
hereditary authority ; but we want nothing more as 
a country than an aristarchy which is defined as "a 
body of good men in power," such men as were de- 
scribed so long ago as the book of Exodus, by the 
wise Jethro : " Moreover, thou shalt provide out of 
all the people, able men, such as fear God, men of 
truth, hating covetousness, and place such over them 
to be rulers." 

The heroes of the pen and tongue, sword and mus- 
ket, whom we honor to-day, were not only advo- 
cates of national independence, but were themselves 
independent men. Their politics was a science, a 
truth, a virtue. As the military character of their 
day was not made up of feathers and- gilt wire, so 
its civic character was something else than hollow 
party names or a popular by-word, though that 
word were " Independence." They were men who 
could hold their own opinions without subserviency, 
and yet with fraternal regard to the compatriots 
who, with equal intelligence and sincerity, held op- 
posite sentiments as to details, though identical in 
principle. They could be bitter enough, too. in their 
discussions, and sometimes in their personal animos- 
ities. Jefferson, Adams and Hamilton were not the 



most amiable persons to one another when the Fed- 
eral and Democratic blood was fairly roused, or per- 
sonal jealousies distorted their vision. But when 
men have something real to contend about under 
their party names, when every turn of opinion is 
shaped by diversity of views as to what is best in the 
inauguration of a government making a new experi- 
ment, and that not for a single country and a single 
generation, but for the world and for all time, we 
may well excuse high words and zealous proselytism. 
But when it comes, alas ! to converting reason, prin- 
ciple, and lessons of history, the whole life and sta- 
Jaility of a government into a scheme for bringing 
John Doe or Richard Roe into the Presidency for 
four years, and their respective hosts into the post 
offices, custom houses, and contractorships for the 
same term, then what is called politics comes clown 
into the arena where " Tom Hj-er " conquers, or the 
area where "Mike Walsh" breaks his neck. 

And here I cannot help taking occasion, from the 
suggestion of what meets m}^ eye as I look over this 
distinguished assembly, of congratulating the Society 
that New Jersey has determined to be represented 
in part, in the next Congress, by a member of the 
Cincinnati.* 

But there are other lineal representatives here to- 



*The Hon. William Pennington, 



24 

day of the virtues of '76, than you, gentlemen of the 
Cincinnati, who, according to the legal or romantic 
fiction, are supposed to have left your ploughs in the 
furrow this morning, and mean to go straight home 
to your cottages and frugal meals as soon as we have 
sung Hail Columbia and Old Hundred. Cincinnatus 
had a wife. Her name, according to some, was At- 
tilia, according to others, Racilia. Perhaps, to be more 
like her husband, she would have her three names, and 
was Attilia Racilia Cincinnatus. The story is, that 
when the Roman deputies came to inform the farmer 
of his first election to the dictatorship, he took a 
" tender leave " of his wife, saying, " I fear, my At* 
tilia, that this year our little fields must remain un- 
sown." Whether the good man meant to attempt a 
little domestic dictatorship, and to insinuate that 
Attilia might attend to the farm while he was gone, 
and whether she thought that she had sewing enough 
of her own to do, we have only human nature to 
judge by ; but (jesting apart) the " Roman woman," 
matron or maiden, is a proverb of patriotism and 
virtue. The story of Valeria, Yolumnia and Vir- 
gilia, and the building of the. temple to "Woman's 
Fortune," belongs to the age of Cincinnatus ; and if 
the women of the American Revolution, who not 
only gave husbands and sons and brothers to the 
militia, but cheered the whole cause by their own 
courage and their actual help, were represented, as 



25 

the men are, by a hereditary association, the Society 
of the Attilia3 would be as large as the Society of the 
Cincinnati. The wife of Cincinnatus has not been 
forgotten by his sons ; for in the description of the 
order, or badge adopted in 1784, next to " the prin- 
cipal figure," is described " on a field in the back- 
ground his wife standing at the door of their cottage." 
It is not required for the badge, as the history 
would warrant, that she should have her husband's 
coat in her hands ; for it is said that as he was digging 
(as we should sa}^ in his shirt sleeves,) when the dep- 
uties came to salute him as "Master of the People," 
he called out to Attilia to bring him his coat to go to 
town in, 

I do not know that it would be a forward step in 
civilization to train our daughters to be doctresses of 
constitutional law, any more than of the practice of 
medicine, but perhaps some lessons from these old 
Roman and old American stories would be as profit- 
able in our seminaries for "young ladies," as the 
modern curriculum of physiology and anatomy. 

At all events we must look more to the domestic 
training of all our youth, for the political, as well as 
moral purity of our country. Politics and morals 
must never be separated. Falsehood, detraction, 
deception, peculation, bribery, perjury, are as crimi- 
nal when perpetrated in the name of a state, or the 
United States, in a capitol or public office, behind a 



26 

legislative desk, with a frank, or " stationery," or a 
ballot, or a job, as when the same offences figure in 
police reports, under the heads of pickpockets, 
swindlers, confidence men, mock auctions, and petty 
larceny. And so the crimes of drunkenness, licen- 
tiousness, and homicide must be exhibited to our 
youth as neither screened nor palliated, in the sight 
of the God of law and purity, by the political or so- 
cial position of the criminals. An immoral act is not 
the less wicked because committed at Washington or 
at Trenton ; a gentleman forfeits his title, whether 
his vulgarity be only for the session, or all the year 
round. 

Fellow-citizens : We have met on the day that re- 
minds us of our privileges as a united, free religious 
nation : the day when, by the favor of Divine Provi- 
dence, we were set apart for a high, broad, and long 
purpose in the designs of Him who docs nothing with- 
out an object worthy of Himself. Our responsibili- 
ties, then, do not end with our country, with the day, 
with ourselves : our gratitude does not end with the 
tribute we render to the men whose names and mem- 
ories are so precious in the associations of this anni- 
versary. The Lord God Almighty is the Father, the 
Defender, the Saviour of our nation. He is its ruler. 
He is its king. There is no independence here. El- 
oquent praises, noisy acclamations, pompous boast- 
ings, solemn professions, make no impression on that 



27 

mind which makes infinite hoHness and infinite truth 
the standard of all moral virtue, in every relation 
sustained by man. Patriotism is a duty to God. To 
pass the test of His approbation it must be sincere, 
faithful and obedient. Like every other duty it should 
be performed religiously, that is, under the motives 
and sanctions implied in the fact that all our obliga- 
tions begin and terminate in God. The political trust' 
He has put into our hands is as sacred, as religious, 
as any other. It is to be used for His glory, and for 
the best welfare of His whole world. 

This is the grand principle that we need to revive 
and purify our patriotism. This is the only security 
for the permanence of what we have acquired. This 
is the ultimate end of what the Almighty has done 
for us, and therefore His voice to our country to-day 
is just what it was to our Jewish pioneers in inde- 
pendence, thirty-three centuries ago, "Because he 
loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed after 
them, and brought them out in his sight with his 
mighty power, * * * ^^ drive out na- 

tions from before thee greater and mightier than thou 
art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for an 
inheritance, as it is this day ; know, therefore, this 
DAY, and consider it in thine heart that the Lord He 
is God in Heaven above, and upon the earth be- 
neath ; there is none else j thou shalt keep, there- 



28 

fore, His statutes and His commandments, which I 
command thee this day, that it may go well with 
thee, and with thy children after thee, and that thou 
may est prolong thy days upon the earth, which the 
Lord thy God giveth thee, forever." 



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